In Maremma/Volume 1/Chapter 2

by Marie Louise de la Ramée

 

CHAPTER II.

 

EANWHILE Joconda Romanelli, the woman who had had the courage to speak a bold word for his sake, left the town to itself and prepared to return on her homeward way to her village of Santa Tarsilla, a long way off upon the coast, a low-lying sickly sea-shore place.

Twice a year regularly she yoked her mule to her cart and drove into Grosseto, making a two days' journey on the road each way, on purpose to sell the homespun linen she had woven from thread she had spun in the six months' time. She knew a hosier in Grosseto who only sold 'nostrali' linen, and gave her a fair price for hers at spring and autumn. She thought him honester than Orbetello folk, so made the longer drive across the wild and lonely country.

She went now to the tavern where she had slept, and where her mule was put up, harnessed him with her own hands, and drove out of the city gates with her hardly-earned gains in a bag amongst the hay and straw at her feet.

She went over the flat desolate lands that lie cheerlessly and barrenly about Grosseto, past the lime quarries of Alberese, over the narrow ill-made roads that traverse the marshes, and over the rivers by ford or ferry or bridge, and underneath hills dark with forest where the buck and the boar roamed at liberty. She drove as long as it was light, then reached a miserable little inn, but a friendly one, and slept there; then at dawn resumed her homeward way.

She drove on and on, the old mule ambling slowly, for he only had long journeys twice a year, and resented them mournfully; the moss and the marshes, the wide fields lying red and bare for the plough, and the little knots of pale dust-coloured houses that made the villages of the hill-sides, were passed in succession until she got across country and down to the level of the sea, and saw little else save stunted aloes and sand, though the distance was dark with the outskirts of the retreating Apennines, and the woods upon the Giglio island rose up in sight.

When she could see the isle she had reached her home, an old house of stone and oak timber standing near the wharf of the small township of Santa Tarsilla, on a little bay, that scholars affirmed had once been, like its neighbours Telamone and Populonia, a port of those sea-kines, the Etruscans.

In this little bay some small traffic in fish, and in the stone and charcoal from inland, kept the little place from absolute stagnation and death; but in the summer nearly all its few souls fled away, and in summer no coasting smack cared to lie by its little quay.

For it was full of miasma and fever in the hot season, like all these places on the low Maremma coast; even now in the late days of October the fever mists still hung about it, the pools and the beach still sent out noxious vapours, the scanty population sat about listless and shivering, the children lay on the sand too weak to care to play, and there were but two or three of them in all the place; a few fishermen were out upon the shore, a coastguardsman paced to and fro, a little vessel was shipping grain, anchored amongst the mud-choked shoals: that was all.

It was a dreary place at the best of times; antiquaries said that the sea had receded nearly a mile since the days when the Etruscan pirates had sailed from that bay, and Etruscan lucomonies had had their fortresses and their tombs away yonder where the shore line grew dusky with thickets of bay and rosemary and the prickly marucca, or holy thorn,^[1] so common here.

'You are safe home, mother?' said the pallid women, as the mule of Joconda picked his way amidst the stones and sand to his own house door.

'Aye, the saints be praised,' said Joconda, and said no more.

They knew the woman of Savoy never chattered, and that it was useless to ask from her gossip of Grosseto until she had stabled her beast and broken her fast, and of not very much use after that. Joconda went on to her own dwelling; it was all of stone with a roof of red tiles; it was old and spacious, and had pointed casements and a massive oak door; her living-room and her bed-chamber were all the rooms she used; the next room she had given to her mule and her poultry, and a fine black pig. The floors were of stone, and the ceilings too; there was an open hearth that served her for cooking; the hearth now was cold.

She first put her money into a secret place, stabled her mule, counted her fowls, to be sure none were stolen, and then lit a little fire and put on a pot of vegetable soup. Then she sat down and thought while her frugal supper was simmering.

She did not tell anyone of what she had seen, and heard, and promised in Grosseto. She was not a sociable woman, and she had only neighbours, no friends.

Joconda Romanelli had been taciturn and grave for forty years; ever since one summer day, when her man had gone down in a white squall, like that which wrecked Shelley. She had loved the man, and had been sternly faithful to him and to the offspring he had left her. She had always got her own living by carrying cargo to the coasters for her husband's comrades, and taking her linen into Grosseto; in bad weather she sat at home and span, or made fishing nets and sewed sails. She was active and very hardy; she lived honestly, and in a stern, cleanly fashion that made her village people think her odd and be a little afraid of her. Her sons had died of the marsh fever and her daughter had left her a motherless grandson, a bold fair boy, the lamb that Saturnino had saved ten years before when the boy had gone up with his goats into the mountains; for which mercy Joconda and her lad had blessed him every day and night they told their beads.

But though Saturnino had spared the boy, the fever had not done so; and ever since his death Joconda had dwelt alone with her dead memories. She had been a sad woman always, but she was a strong one. She worked for her living, and owed nobody a bronze piece, and was half respected and half feared, which she liked better than being loved.

Fifty years before she had been brought here from her mountain home fronting the high chain of the Grand Paradis by her husband after a fishing cruise to the seaboard of lower Savoy, and the tradition of her northern birth made her still 'a stranger' to the people of Santa Tarsilla and all the low-lying shore. She had never seen Savoy for nigh fifty years, but she was 'the woman of Savoy' to them all.

It had been a fatal day for her when her mother's sister, a farmer's wife near S. Martin Lantosque, had lost her cows one by one by disease, and sent to beg that her niece, who was so skilled in dairy matters, would go and spend a summer with her; and in the course of that summer, up at Lantosque, to visit mountain neighbours, there had come some seafaring men from Villafranca, away on the seaboard, and amongst them had been a man of Maremma, Sostegno Romanelli, the owner of a tartana then lying off the shores of Savoy. He had been a handsome young man, and at that time well-to-do as a coaster; he had persuaded the blue-eyed maiden from the green alps above the Val de Cogne to give a favourable answer to his wooing. She and he had been wedded that same summer at the little church of S. Martin, and she had gone to live with him at his native Maremmana town.

Things had done very well with them awhile; then turned and went as ill. The tartana had to be sold, and its owner had to become a deep-water fisherman, working for the gain of others. His wife, ashamed of their troubles, which her own people had predicted, ceased to write to the châlet under the arolla forests.

They were homely people there on the pine-clad heights above Cogne, but there was always a homely plenty, and no penury touched them. They were good-hearted, but hard of mind and scanty in sympathy. She could never bring herself to tell them that she had married into poverty, and was sick to death of this fatal shore to which her Maremmano had brought her. So silence fell between her and her own family, and up on the mountain slopes that faced the Grand Paradis her brothers and sisters ceased to remember and ceased to regret her.

She slept a little now over her supper, being weary; she was woke by neighbours' voices; women were looking in at her window and tapping at it, being unable any longer to subdue their eagerness for news.

'Is it true that Saturnino has been taken, good mother?' they asked her.

'Ay, ay, why not?' she answered crossly. 'He has been taken.'

'Did you see him in Grosseto?'

'Yes, the poor soul! with his legs tied under the horse's belly.'

'Oh, the hard pity of it!' mourned the gossips with a wail.

'He has got his deserts,' said Joconda. 'A fine long time he has been loose on these hills. Luck always changes.'

'It was that foreign man that made the fuss,' the women muttered. 'He must have been some great prince, else never would they have captured Saturnino for his misfortune.'

'Misfortune' was their fine way of speaking; they knew well that the traveller had been foully murdered.

'He killed the foreigner,' said Joconda curtly. 'He had killed scores. That one was the one too much. That was all.'

The women at the window muttered that this was just the caprice and injustice of the government and the soldiers; a murder more or less (if it were a murder), did it matter so much? Saturnino was a fine bold man, and never had harmed the poor.

'Why, he had good about him,' assented Joconda. 'But murder is not a good thing; I wish he had had other ways of living. Alas! poor soul! upon that rock of Gorgona his crimes will be cold comfort to him.'

'And that is true, said the gossips, crossing themselves; 'did you speak to him, mother? Was there any chance to say a word?'

'Yes; I spoke to him.'

'What did he say to you?'

'He reminded me of my dead lamb, and I told him I had not forgot my debt.'

'Was that all?'

'Yes; get you to your beds; I want to get to mine.'

And she nodded to them, and shut her latticed casement behind its wire grating, and shut out the sight of the moonlit sea, and the shining sands that hid her dead. She heard them under her house wall on the edge of the beach, for the night was still young, talking still of the hero of the hills and of his fate. She heard the deeper tones of a man's voice strike across theirs and say:

'No bolder soul ever lived than Saturnino Mastarna. They have taken him, and they will cage him out on Gorgona yonder, or send him to the King's mines. If man could free him, I would free him. What did he do ever? Did he steal from the poor? No. Did he rob the church? No. Did ever a peasant miss his sheep, or a woodman his wallet; or a labourer that had got his wages in his waistband, was he ever lightened of them by Saturnino? Nay, never. That we know. We have come and gone on his mountains and never were we the worse. When old Montino was lost in the snow on Santa Fiora, what did Mastarna do when he found him? Took him to his own hut, and warmed, and fed him, and gave him of the best, and when he saw that old Montino had a bag of gold pieces with him, said to him, "Fear nothing; neither I nor my men will touch your gold, because you are an old man and a steward, and the loss would get you blamed by your masters, maybe thrown in prison." And when full day came, he himself took Montino down the mountain as far as the first ford that crosses the Fiora. Five hundred times, if once, have I heard the history from Montino himself. Nay, Saturnino was a brave man, and a generous, and because he aided this stranger to escape from the burden of life, they have caged him in a trap as you catch a dondola. It is vile. The stranger was a rich man in his own country, a great prince, they say; what did he do here in Italy? why not stay where he was? It was always the rich that Mastarna made war on; the poor were sacred to him. That we know. Yet he will lie in chains amidst the waves on Gorgona, or waste his strength in the mines in the bowels of the earth. It is unjust. It is unjust.'

Then an assenting and approving murmur rose up from the listening people and joined with the murmur of the sea.

Joconda heard them as she lay on her hard straw bed.

'And there is a grain of truth in what they say,' she thought. 'Yet his sins were many and deep, poor soul! and they will be heavier about his neck than the chains he will wear on Gorgona. May Christ lighten them!'

Then she slept.

She was a woman who usually enjoyed the dreamless, heavy sleep of the hard worker; but all through this night she dreamed and saw the bold form of Saturnino chained, and with his crimes written on his breast for any who chose to read, even as he would be henceforth in all his years to come on the sunburnt, wave-beaten rock: the eagle of the mountains fettered to a stone in the sea.

At daybreak her mind was made up; she took a stout staff in her hand, slung her wallet about her, with some bread in it and some goat's ham cured Savoy fashion, and went out towards the mountains.

She was a strong woman, though old, and she walked briskly. The pasture lands and marshes were desolate, and she met scarce anyone; here and there a furze cutter or a ploughman with his oxen, that was all. She soon quitted the sight of the sea, and bore inland by the course of the Albegna river, through solitary untracked thickets, and over rough rocky ground.

After some hours she came to cross roads, and there sat down on a stone, and waited for the public waggon running from Orbetello to Monte Murano to come by; when it jolted near her, its miserable horses straining at their rope harness, she stopped it, and got into it; it lumbered on under a volley of blows and oaths rained on the patient, sinking beasts.

At Monte Murano she descended, and was forced to sleep; with daybreak she left the place, and thence had to make her way as best she might up to what had been the brigand's favourite lair, although he had others in the fastnesses of the Ciminian mountains, which he frequented when it pleased him to descend upon the southward road nearer Rome, where more than once he had even stopped the mail train itself as it had rolled over the marshes and beneath the sombre gloom of the maritime pines, and had swerved off the line as it encountered the timber and stones that Saturnino's men had placed there in its path.

He had been always called Saturnino of the Santa Fiora, though his range had extended so much farther than these peaks, and towards Santa Fiora she made her way through the dense underwood and luxuriant vegetation that here cover the soil, where the roads are mere mule tracks, often effaced, and the amphitheatre of the mountains enclose a solitude and a silence scarcely ever broken save by sound of sheep-bell, or cry of bittern, or the browsing murmur of the teeth of wild cattle chewing the luscious grass.

Here on the wooded cliffs was once Saturnia, whose giant walls still remain, overgrown with laurestinus and mountain box and butcher's broom, and in the hovels that occupy its site, and take its name, where Saturnino forty-five years before had seen the light, there is a filthy little drinking-house, whose only customers are the shepherds and the woodcutters and the muleteers.

There Mastarna, as the hero and martyr of the soil, was being lamented by a knot of ill-looking foresters as Joconda passed the open door by which they were sitting together playing at dominoes. Being a brave woman, and not caring for their ill looks, she gathered from them what direction to take so as to reach the mountain crest without sinking miserably in a quagmire, or wandering till dead of hunger in the intricacy of the pathless jungle.

She asked for the Rocca del Giulio, and they pointed it to her; far, very far away, where the autumn snows lay on the highest lines of the hills. She took her staff and wallet and set out again.

'You cannot reach it to-night, mother,' the men said to her.

She said to them, 'Very well. No one will hurt me. I am old and ugly, and I have not a coin to steal.'

They laughed and asked her why she went; she told them 'to get a child to nurse;' and with the prudence of her country appended to the fact a fiction of a daughter whose infant was dead, and who needed one to suckle.

'A little lie is always useful,' thought Joconda, though she was not a false or a faithless woman.

Then she lost sight of the foaming, turbulent Fiora, and began her climb towards the mountain summits. The ways were very steep and very long; night overtook her. She took shelter in an empty hut of a shepherd, and ate and drank out of her wallet, and slept not ill, for she was tired and not timorous.

The great lonely mountain-side, with the water freshets of autumn tearing down it to swell the Fiora water, was about her when she awoke. She could not see the rock she wanted above her, a grey speck under the snows. She was stiff, and felt as if she were frozen from sleeping out of her bed on the damp leaves; but she resumed her upward way. It was again noon when she passed the last robur-oak and cork trees and came up amidst wind-wasted pines and boulders of granite and slate, tossed about on a wild mountain scarp; as if in the horseplay of giants,

She saw scarce any one; the scattered folk of the hills were most of them in hiding, stricken with terror at the seizure of Saturnino, with whom they were all in habits of greater or lesser complicity.

One old man was met with, very old and bent. He was looking for simples in the many herbs that clothed the hillside. He told her at last where the Rocca del Giulio was, pointing, as he spoke, to a spot far away amidst the snow that had fallen on the heights.

'That was Saturnino's nest,' he said. 'Poor soul! They have taken him, and killed most of his men. He never did me any harm.'

He was very old, and not curious; being so, he let her go on upward without question.

Here the snow had fallen heavily. It had ceased to fall now, but there was a sharp frost on these heights, and the ground was white and hard. The stunted trees looked black. It was very desolate. The clouds were low upon the mountain side, and their mists were all around her. She could see the white crests of the Labbro and the Santa Fiora loom close on her, it seemed, in the steel-hued fog. She had never been so high up on the mountains since her girlhood, sixty and more years before in the alps about the feet of the Becca di Nona. The sight of the great cones of snow so near beside her, the feeling of the crisp clear air and the icy freshness of it, gave her a strange sensation—the sickness of nostalgia coming on her in old age, after a long life in the swamps and on the shore.

A sudden thirst made her throat and her heart ache with longing for her old home, set on a granite ledge of rock, with the valley of Cogne stretching below it, and the white summit of Mont Blanc in sight beyond the gorge, and nearer at hand the peaks and glaciers of the Grand Paradis, her old home, with its girdle of deep green forest, and its ceaseless sound of rushing water, and its alpine winds, that are known no more to the dwellers of the plains than what the condor of the Andes beholds in its flight is known to the hedge-sparrow in the thorn-bush by the road.

It was sixty long years since she had felt that wind upon her forehead, and heard that rush of ice-fed waters as they leapt from rock to rock; since she had lifted her voice in the jödel of the hills, and rested her eyes on that fresh flowering grass, those deep cool shadows of the pines. Yet now and then it all came back upon her as it did now, clear as a dream of the night, and then the sea would fade away, and the sands recede, and the misty scorching dust-grey shores grow dim to her, and her eyes would only be dry because she had grown too old to weep. And when she slept, it was of these she dreamed almost always; above all, in the stifling midnights of the terrible canicular heat, when the air was like steam, and the soil was like brass, and there was no freshness or peace in the darkness, and with its fall no dews.

She felt for the brigand's image in her bosom, and drew it out and looked at it; then walked to the first house that lay in her way.

They seemed all empty. There was not a sound, except the soughing of wind in the tops of the pines.

She called, and no one answered. She shouted again and again, but her voice died on the mountain stillness unanswered. Then she pushed open a door and looked inside. The houses were little more than stone huts, and they were all deserted; hastily deserted, it seemed to her; for there were things strewn about them, and here and there pools of blood, and broken arms upon the frozen snow. She could have guessed how it had been, even had she known nothing of the capture of Saturnmo; guessed that there had been a struggle here, and the women had left in hurried flight.

'How shall I find his lamb?' she thought, with a sigh half of regret, half of relief; and she stood still and looked.

The few people who had dwelt there had fled, that was plain to her; most likely out of fear of the soldiery.

'Poor souls!' she said, and crossed herself, seeing the scarcely dried blood on the stones.

A dog's bark startled her.

It was a bark of anger and of appeal both in one. She rose and went in the direction of the sound. It came from the last of the stone huts. She pushed open the door as she had done that of the other. A great dog, snow-white, stood in the centre of the clay floor; under his body was a child asleep.

'The child of Serapia!' she thought, as she looked down on the sleeping infant. Serapia had been but a name—a legend—to the dwellers of the shore and plains.

Wild tales were always told of how Saturnino had ravished her from her people; people beggared though of noble blood, who dwelt on a wind-swept spur of the Sabine hills, by whom she was cursed, and looked on as one dead.

A beautiful, ignorant, mindless thing she had ever been; foolish and passionate from the hour that she had been borne away, a second Proserpine, to the night of oblivion, peril, and crime in which her brute-lover dwelt. One short year only she had been carried, half a captive, half a willing mistress, to that topmost haunt of the hills where all that Saturnino knew as home was made. There she had died; some said of fever, some said of a blow from Saturnino; anyway she had died, and had been buried where the tall stone pines rose up like columns of a temple against the marble of the porches. And her child was here, asleep amidst a scene of carnage made more horrible by the dreaming smile of a baby's rest.

In the cabin there were loose coins, gold, and jewels, dropped and stamped on as they had been caught up in the haste of flight; a rich shawl was thrown aside upon the beaten earth of the ground, a length of gold brocade was tossed against a rough-hewn table, overturned; close to the child's bed there was a carved ivory toy such as are made in India. In the child's hand was a dry half-eaten crust.

Joconda looked neither to the gold nor stuffs. Her soul was sick at the sight of the pools of blood still wet, and at the sight of the dreaming creature who was left a heritage of crime and woe.

'The blood of Saturnino!' she thought; it seemed to her that it must be as a stream of lava and of poison in the veins of a female child.

'This must be the child,' said Joconda to herself, and stood looking; she was afraid of the white Molossus dog.

The child was two years of age, or two and a half, she thought; not more. It had been forsaken, no doubt, when the mistresses and wives of the band had run for their lives after the men's struggle with the carabiniers.

Joconda stood wavering, on account of the dog; at length she spoke to him, and he looked at her. Then he ceased to growl, and smelt her. Then, apparently satisfied, he let her draw near the child, who was sleeping: a lovely creature, half naked, with long black lashes lying on cheeks like mountain rose-leaves, and loose thick curls like rings of amber.

'It is a woman child; so much the worse,' said Joconda, looking down on it.

If it had been a male, it would have been much easier for her; a boy could soon have run about and done something for his daily bread in the boats, or with the mules, or in the firewoods. However, she remembered that, be it what it would, she had promised Mastarna. She looked timorously at the dog, and raised the child without waking it; he looked at her in return, watchfully, but comprehending that she meant it no injury. She saw at the baby's throat a little golden image; then she wrapped her shawl about it, and said to the dog 'Come.'

For the dog was alone, and Joconda was a woman of hard aspect but good heart.

The dog was of the same race as Ulysses' faithful friend, perhaps the purest and most ancient canine race of all in the world, and one of the boldest and most beautiful; he was fierce and powerful, but full of sympathy and wisdom; he bent his head, sniffed at her feet, gazed sorrowfully in her eyes, put his nose to the child's cheek, then went with her down the path by which she had climbed to what had been, until the night before, the brigand's home.

She began to descend the mountain, but night drew nigh, and the child, who still slept, was a heavy weight. She stopped at the first cabin she came to, and asked for shelter. The charcoal-burners, who dwelt there, knew the look of the child and the dog, and would not take her in; they were afraid Saturnino's daughter might bring them trouble with the police. Joconda cursed them heartily for cowards.

She made her way with great fatigue, and with strong effort managed to reach the inn where she had slept the first night. Here they did not know the child nor the dog, or did not say that they did.

'Ah! thou hast got the baby for thy step-daughter,' was all the woman of the house said to her; and Joconda answered—

'Ay; but it has ceased to suck; that is a pity.'

Long before this the child had wakened more than once, and had cried and sobbed, and become very troublesome. The dog was quiet and sad.

They gave her goat's milk and black bread, and let her and the child and the dog sleep altogether in a room full of hay and straw. She and the baby slept well; the dog but little.

The following morning she resumed her journey, and returned as she had come, only that she had the burden of the infant and the companionship of the animal.

The child was now wakeful, impatient, tyrannous; the dog, as he got farther and farther from his old home, was melancholy, and footsore, and anxious.

'You are like a white lion,' she said to him, and named him Leone: what names either he or the child had borne before she could not tell.

It was still fresh, fine weather, happily for her, for she had to walk much, and it took her several days to return on foot, and the diligence only ran once a week, and she missed it at Monte Murano. She was an old woman, and she became very weary.

It was evening once more when she drew nigh her own village.

The pale sands, the tufa rocks, the background of marshes and stagnant water looked very dreary even to her who had been used to them all her life; there was a sickly haze upon the sea, and a fog upon the horizon.

Two or three of her neighbours, wasted and wan-looking folks, gave her good evening, and glanced at the child and the dog.

'Is that child of thy kin, mother?' they asked curiously.

'Nay; I have no kin here. It is a dead friend's child, she answered them wearily, for she was very tired.

'And the dog?'

'He was my dead friend's dog; he followed me. I could not turn him adrift.'

'They will be hungry mouths, mother?'

'Ay; but I will not ask you to feed them.'

Then they laughed and stared and wondered, but dared not ask more, and let her be.

She made her way to her own house, and drew the great key from her girdle, and unlocked her door and opened it, and entered, leading the child by the hand, and followed by the dog.

It was cold and dark and cheerless. The child was awed, and the dog dulled, by the stillness and solitude, the greyness and gloom. The sound of the sea breaking on the sands below was more mournful than perfect silence.

Joconda kneeled down by the crucifix that hung on the wall and made the little limbs of the baby kneel too.

'See me, good saints, and bear ye testimony that I have kept my word. Be this young thing blessing or curse, I have kept my word. Be ye good to us both.'

Then she rose and fetched from her closets water and milk, salted fish and bread, and broke her fast, and gave food and drink to both the child and the beast.

When she went to rest, the rosy and fresh-washed warmth of the child was on her rough couch, and the white Molossus was stretched before her door. She could not tell whether she were sorry or content. She was at least no longer alone.

'But the blood of Saturnino?' she said doubtfully to herself. Any way, she had kept her word.

As she had stumbled down along the stony mountain road, the weight of the two-year-old child heavy on her shoulder, she, being a religious woman, had bethought her that surely it had never been baptised, and pondered on what holy name to give to this offspring of sinners.

She knew her calendar by heart, and called to mind that this autumnal day, with the deep white snow on the heights, and the red and gold ash-foliage in the woods, was the twenty-ninth of October, the day dedicated by the Latin Church to that sad and little remembered eastern saint, Mary the Penitent.

Joconda was not a book-learned woman. She could spell out her missal, that was all; but she vaguely remembered that Santa Maria Penitente had had the grace of heaven given her after sorrow and shame, and that in her story there was a dragon who devoured a dove, and out of the body of the monster the beautiful white bird had come forth unharmed and spread its wings, and shot upward to the sun. And for sure this is a dove come forth from a dragon, she had said to herself, looking at the sleeping child, and so had resolved that when she should get down back to her own little town, the child should be received into the Church by the name of Maria Penitente and no other.

1. Paliurus australis.

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